Used For

• +**Copy-pasting SQL everywhere and breaking reports when logic changes** → Write once, reuse everywhere, fix propagates automatically to all downstream tables
• +**Stale dashboard data making executives ask why revenue dropped 40% overnight** → Built-in tests catch bad data before it reaches your CEO's Monday report
• +**Spending 15 hours/week manually joining customer and order data** → Automated models run on schedule, your weekends are free again
• +**Raw event logs that look like alphabet soup to your BI tool** → Clean, documented tables that actually make sense to humans
• +Incremental processing - only transforms new data instead of rerunning 6-month queries every night

Best For

• >Your data team rewrites the same joins 50 times and someone always forgets to filter out test accounts
• >Weekend data pipeline failures are ruining your sleep and your dashboards show wrong numbers Monday morning
• >You have SQL skills but your transformation scripts are held together with duct tape and prayers

Not For

• -Teams without a data warehouse - this adds zero value if you're still living in Excel land
• -Non-technical users wanting drag-and-drop - this is pure SQL code, no pretty interface to click around
• -Solo analysts doing ad-hoc queries - overkill if you just need to answer 'how many users signed up last week'

Pairs With

• *Snowflake (where your actual data lives and dbt runs the transformations)
• *Fivetran (loads raw data from 700+ sources so dbt has something to transform)
• *Tableau (visualizes the clean tables that dbt creates)
• *Airflow (schedules dbt runs and handles the orchestration workflow)
• *GitHub (version control for your dbt models because someone will break something)
• *Slack (where dbt sends alerts when tests fail at 3am)

The Catch

• !You need to be comfortable with command line and writing SQL - no GUI means you're editing code files like a developer
• !Jinja templating adds a learning curve beyond basic SQL (loops, conditionals, variables)
• !Free version requires you to manage everything yourself - no hand-holding or managed infrastructure

Bottom Line

Finally, reusable SQL that doesn't break when Karen from marketing changes the spreadsheet schema.